I have had a need today to try to boot off of a SuperDuper backup on one of my G-Drive's. The SuperDuper backup was made off of a 2011 iMac that has a vid card issue and needed to be taken in. So I initially tried booting the backup onto an older iMac via FW800 and FW400 and the startup process would begin and then mid-way through the startup, the drive would shut down and consequently the iMac would shut off. I tried this on a 2012 Retina MacBook Pro and got everything running - boot from G-Drive to MBP. But walked away from it and came back and everything shut down. Now I cannot get it to finish the startup process without the drive shutting itself down, then shutting the machine down, same as the iMac. It seems to my novice eyes that the drive is timing out and assuming it is not needed and simply spinning down.

The drive is new and so I am not familiar with it, or the G-Tech family, as of yet. I have noticed that the drive (and its sister drive) will occasionally unmount themselves. They both seem to mount fine as external volumes, just having an issue as a boot volume. I see a FAQ that the Thunderbolt series cannot be used for booting, but is this the case with the Firewire series, too?

Thanks for posting. While we don't officially support the boot drive function for our drives as it is an OS feature not a drive feature the drive powering off sounds like a power issue. The 3TB unit should be the regular g-drive so the power adapter should be a 12v 2amp output. You should check to see if you are using the correct adapter. If the specs are correct you could try using a different adapter with it. You could use a universal or if you just bought it recently you should be in warranty and you could call in to the support center to setup getting a replacement power adapter through the warranty, however that would take a few days to arrive.